Hummingbird 4 Twitter

Shortly after I hit that cap with Twitter I took some time off from building my Twitter accounts – so it’s been a few days since I posted an update. But just a couple days ago I was back at it – this time using a new method of identifying more targeted tweeps.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had hit the cap of 2,000 followers – meaning I was following 2,000 people and wasn’t being allowed to follow any more (regardless of whether I used Hummingbird to do the following). But only about 1,500 or so people were following me. So, the clear strategy at that point was to un-follow some people, and then find more targeted people to follow. But I recommend putting a little more thought into it to get the most bang for your follow. So that’s what I did.

After you get to the point of following 2,000 or more people, your strategy for gaining followers of your own must change. Up until that point, if you follow enough people, you’re bound to get some followers yourself. But after you follow 2,000 people, Twitter caps you, and you have to start really thinking about un-following the less targeted people in your follower list, and then following some more targeted people in their place. This is how I did it:

I un-followed about 700 people, to get my follower list back down to about 1,300. Then I tweeted, over the course of the day, about half a dozen tweets on a topic that was hyper relevant to the audience I want to follow me (prospective clients in a certain industry) – making sure that my last tweet was particularly intriguing. Then I found a Twitter user (using the Twitter user search) who had lots of followers in the industry I was targeting. I followed a bunch of that user’s followers, and surprise surprise, I found that the percentage who followed me back was much higher than when I followed people en masse.

And better than that, once I got more than about 1,800 followers, Twitter started raising the cap on the number of people I could follow myself…first to about 2,010…then when I had about 1,900 followers I was able to follow closer to 2,075. It seems like – just as I mentioned at the bottom of this post – you are allowed to follow about 10% more people than are following you.

So, I’m back on the climb…

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So, I took a couple days off from growing my follower list with Hummingbird, and the list actually still kept growing. When I picked back up on day 6, however, I quickly hit the Twitter imposed cap of 2,000 followees (people I’m following). Actually it was 2,001 for some strange reason – but after I hit this cap, Twitter wouldn’t let me follow any more people. My follower list continued to grow – I like to think it’s because I’m tweeting some good stuff – but of course not as fast as before. The cap is a supposedly a “soft cap,” though, and you can move beyond it.

Follower list growth slowed after I hit the 2,000 followee "Soft Cap"

According to this forum post, that’s because I only had 1,700 or so followers, and at this point, Twitter won’t let you follow more than 2,001 people until you have 1950 followers yourself. Again, this is just according to a forum post I read – and I plan to test the theory. Here’s the quote from the forum:

Question: How do I break through the 2,000 Following ceiling and are there other ceilings involved in building the Followings and Followers list?

Reply: This is actually really easy to do. Once you hit 2000, just un-follow some people.

If you are following 2000 and only have 1700 followers, un-follow 300, and then follow more.
Once you hit around 1950 followers, you will break through the 2000 cap, although twitter seems to set the number at 2001 as well.

Once you are over 2000, you can follow 10% more than the people who follow you.

So at 3000, you can only follow 10% more, which is 3300.
and so on…

4000 – 4400 etc.

Apparently this 2,000 followee cap hasn’t always been imposed – which is why you can find so many people following 25,000+ people on Twitter. They were likely following more than 2,000 people when Twitter implemented the rule (some time in 2008?), and were ‘grandfathered’ in.

If I’m really only going to be able to follow 10% more people than are following me from here on out, I imagine my list of followers will grow a little more slowly – but I’m going to keep at it, and keep you posted.

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I mentioned that I was going to compare my own results using the Hummingbird software to the results promised by the software creator. Here I am on day 4…and while I’m not quite to the 25k follower mark (not by a long shot), I am making noticeable progress…up to nearly 1,500 followers.

The question I have is how many of these followers really have seen my tweets and think I’m interesting enough to follow, versus how many don’t know what they’re doing, versus how many just follow whoever follows them. Anyone in internet marketing knows that quantity isn’t everything – quality is equally important. And that’s something I’ll be paying close attention to in the days that follow. If people start engaging with @replies, visiting the website on my profile, and clicking my bit.ly links, then I’ll know the followers are good followers.

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On the Hummingbird website, the software makers claim that they grew their list of followers from 4,500 to over 20,000 in just a month.

But I’m just the kind of person who has to see it to believe it. So, I bought the software myself a few days ago – and ran a quick test on one of my Twitter accounts.

The chart at the bottom shows the results of my quick 2-day test.

By the way – this chart represents the followers I gained on only one of my accounts. I’ve used Hummingbird on several accounts now – and gained thousands of followers across them all, in total. And just in 2 days.

In all honesty I’ve probably spent :30 minutes a day on this. It’s not going to run itself – you’ve got to put a little work in. But Hummingbird makes it FAR easier than following all these people one-by-one.

[update 4/29: I realize the chart shows 4 days of "predicted" progress. My mistake - looks like I actually gained just about 2oo followers in 2 days - not 300.]

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